Official Day 1: Taking out the silkworm eggs

Hi, again! Spring has finally arrived in my area. It's awfully late this year; it's already April 19th.

The mulberry leaves have finally started sprouting, and the first cherry blossoms have already dropped, giving way to new spring leaves. I may take some pictures of the mulberry trees to give an idea of what the leafy situation is right now.

The mulberry leaves have been growing for the past week or so, so we decided that now is the best time for taking out the silkworm eggs. We've kept them refrigerated well since the last post, so it's been a little over a month. If everything goes well, the silkworm eggs should hatch in 2-10 days.

Here are pictures of the petri dish containing the eggs:

The dish even comes equipped with a little instructional blurb:

We're planning on leaving the silkworm eggs in the petri dish until they hatch out; then we'll start transferring them to a larger shoe box or plastic container. The petri dish is not tightly sealed, so if any silkworms hatch out these next few days, they shouldn't suffocate to death. I anticipate that today is the start of a very hectic month of daily feeding, cleaning, and caring of the silkworm larvae. It'll be 4-6 weeks before they'll undergo metamorphosis to become breeding, adult moths.

It's rather sad, but adult moths live short lives full of nothing but four main goals: find a mate, have sex, lay eggs, and die. They unfortunately don't have functioning mouths, so they most likely die of starvation shortly after breeding. They're quite cute, though, and are furry little innocuous buggers. On the downside, the sexual discharge or fluid reeks and often stains the surrounding material a distasteful shade of yellowish brown (sort of like iodine, only smellier).

Hopefully we can stick to the regime of daily silkworm cleaning and feeding. If so, then we can expect many silkworms to become moths by next month and eventually pair off. Of course, we only need a few pairs; if we have a lot of cocoons, we may set aside just a few silk cocoons for breeding and allow those to hatch while boiling the rest for silk reeling. Remember, there are 500 eggs in that petri dish, give or take, and since an average female silk moth can lay around 200-500 eggs, just imagine how many eggs we'll have if we allowed all of them to breed! That would be insanity!

We'll be monitoring the eggs closely for the next few days; if I remember, I'll post an update on the first egg hatching.